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Discovery Driven Planning

Among the many myths that corporate types have about startups (whether standalone or of the corporate variety) is that there is some kind of alchemy involved. Sort of “Steve Jobs arrives on a clamshell and the world is changed forever!”. They think growing new businesses requires some instinctive DNA that founders are born with and…

No Powerpoints, no notes, just the team at Harvard Business Review, terrific and astute questions from viewers and a white board. Check out this free Facebook Live session that has already garnered over 132,000 views. In more news – For those with an interest, our Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship OnLine course is now in beta – let us know if…

It’s been five or more years since the Great recession walloped economies all over the world, with the result that for many companies it has been a time of doing not very much but cost-cutting, downsizing, divesting and otherwise holding on to what business they can by their fingernails. Now, as things are slowly starting…

The Times of Trenton has picked up some topics from my talk on discovery driven planning at the Princeton Chamber of Commerce. It was a fun and lively session and the Chamber folks ask great questions!

A few months ago, I had the pleasure to give the keynote speech at the annual CFO "Core Concerns" conference published by CFO Magazine. The topic – how can you invest in growth, while containing risk – seemed to resonate with the folks gathered there. You can read the lead story in CFO Magazine by…

Mac teaches Discovery Driven Planning in his entrepreneurship classes at Wharton, and received the following story about how one of his students applied DDP: Mac, I took your MGMT 802 class earlier this year. I'm working for a start-up in D.C. this summer, and I wanted to share with you how incredibly helpful the DDP…

My dear colleagues Jim Thompson and Ian MacMillan have just published a fascinating description of their work on social entrepreneurship, entitled "Making Social Ventures Work". It's a neat usage of discovery driven planning in an entrepreneurial setting. Here's how it starts: In recent years, we’ve all experienced considerable volatility—financial breakdowns, natural disasters, wars, and…

While looking for something else, I ran across this post which provides an outline for an entrepreneurial business using the discovery driven planning framework. I know many of you are always keen to find additional examples and applications, so I thought I'd provide a link.

CIO Magazine's recent blog post features a summary of some of the principles of Discovery Driven Growth, and links the idea to concepts of IT agility. Wouldn't it be great if CIO's and CFO's could embrace discovery-driven principles?

I was recently fortunate enough to be teaching in a very interesting program for strategy consultants at IBM. One of their senior leaders, an ex-BCG guy, pointed out to me that I really could use a picture to communicate the value of Discovery Driven Growth. Here, therefore is his suggestion! What it basically shows you…